Meet Pella KÃ¥german, the co-director of ANIARA

One of the more unique titles at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival is the science-fiction epic ANIARA, co-directed by Pella Kågerman and Hugo Lilja. Made with modest means and a surplus of ingenuity, ANIARA is based on a 1956 epic poem by Swedish Nobel Prize winner Harry Martinson and details what happens after we destroy our planet and seek refuge elsewhere. Harrowing and sobering in its portrait of what human beings are capable of, ANIARA constantly surprises. It’s part of a string of intelligent, off-genre pictures from Sweden — such as Ali Abbasi’s Cannes hit Border, also screening at this year’s Festival — which are built around issues and which ask probing, disturbing questions.